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        <section class="chapter">
    
            <h1>Chapitre 1</h1>
    
            <p class="pfirst">For four centuries the noise of controversy has raged round
                the cradle of Typography. Volumes have been written,
                lives have been spent, fortunes have been wasted, communities
                have been stirred, societies have been organised,
                a literature has been developed, to find an answer to the
                famous triple question: “When, where, and by whom
                was found out the unspeakably useful art of printing
                books?” And yet the world to-day is little nearer a
                finite answer to the question than it was when Ulric Zel indited his memorable
                narrative to the <em>Cologne Chronicle</em> in 1499. Indeed, the dust of battle has added
                to, rather than diminished, the mysterious clouds which envelope the problem,
                and we are tempted to seek refuge in an agnosticism which almost refuses to
                believe that printing ever had an inventor.</p>
    
            <p>It would be neither suitable nor profitable to encumber an investigation of
                that part of the History of Typography which relates to the types and type-making
                of the fifteenth century by any attempt to discuss the vexed question of
                the Invention of the Art. The man who invented Typography was doubtless
                the man who invented movable types. Where the one is discovered, we have
                also found the other. But, meanwhile, it is possible to avail ourselves of
                whatever evidence exists as to the nature of the types he and his successors used,
                and as to the methods by which those types were produced,
                and possibly to arrive at some conclusions respecting the earliest practices of the
                Art of Typefounding
                in the land and in the age in which it first saw the light.</p>
    
            <p>No one has done more to clear the way for a free
                investigation of all questions relating to the origin
                of printing than Dr. Van der Linde, in his able essay,
                <em>The Haarlem Legend</em>,
                <span class="footnote" data-note="01" id="note-01"><em>The Haarlem Legend of the Invention of Printing by
                        Lourens Janszoon Coster, critically examined.</em> From the Dutch by J.
                    H. Hessels, with an introduction and classified list of the Costerian
                    Incunabula. London, 1871. 8vo.</span> which, while disposing ruthlessly of
                the fiction of Coster’s invention, lays down the important
                principle, too often neglected by writers on the subject,
                that the essence of Typography consists in the mobility of
                the types, and that, therefore, it is not a development of
                the long practised art of printing from fixed blocks, but
                an entirely distinct invention.
            </p>
    
            <p>The principle is so important, and Dr. Van der Linde’s words are so
                emphatic, that we make no apology for quoting them:―</p>
    
            <p>“I cannot repeat often enough that, when we speak of Typography and its
                invention, nothing is meant, or rather nothing must be meant, but printing with
                <em>loose</em> (separate, moveable) types (be they letters, musical notes, or other figures),
                which therefore, in distinction from letters cut on wooden or metal plates, may be
                put together or separated according to inclination. One thing therefore is certain:
                he who did not invent printing with moveable types, did, as far as Typography
                goes, invent nothing. What material was used first of all in this invention; of
                what metal the first letters, the patrices (engraved punches) and matrices were
                made; by whom and when the leaden matrices and brass patrices were replaced
                by brass matrices and steel patrices; .&#160;.&#160;.&#160;.&#160;. all this belongs to the secondary
                question of the technical execution of the principal idea: multiplication of
                books by means of multiplication of letters, multiplication of letters by means
                of their durability, and repeated use of the same letters, <em>i.e.</em>, by means of the
                independence (looseness) of each individual letter (moveableness).”—P. 19.
            </p>
    
            <p>If this principle be adopted—and we can hardly imagine it questioned—it
                will be obvious that a large class of works which usually occupy a prominent
                place in inquiries into the origin of Printing, have but slight bearing on the
                history of Typography. The block books of the fifteenth century had little
                direct connection with the art that followed and eclipsed them.<span class="footnote" data-note="02"
                    id="note-02">Xylography did not become extinct
                    for more than half a
                    century after the invention of Typography. The last block book known
                    was printed in Venice in 1510.</span>
                In the one respect of marking the early use of printing for the instruction of mankind, the
                block books and the first works of Typography proper claim an equal interest;
                but, as regards their mechanical production, the one feature they possess in
                common is a quality shared also by the playing-cards,
                pictures, seals, stamps, brands, and all the other applications of the principle of impression which had
                existed in one form or another from time immemorial.</p>
    
            <p>It is reasonable to suppose that the first idea of movable type may have
                been suggested to the mind of the inventor by a study of the works of a
                xylographic printer, and an observation of the cumbrous and wearisome method
                by which his books were produced. The toil involved in first painfully tracing
                the characters and figures, reversed, on the wood, then of engraving them,
                and, finally, of printing them with the frotton, would appear—in the case, at any
                rate, of the small school-books, for the production of which this process was largely
                resorted to—scarcely less tedious than copying the required number by the deft pen
                of a scribe. And even if, at a later period, the bookmakers so far facilitated their
                labours as to write their text in the ordinary manner on prepared paper, or with
                prepared ink, and so transfer their copy, after the manner of the Chinese, on to the
                wood, the labour expended in proportion to the result, and the uselessness of the
                blocks when once their work was done, would doubtless impress an inventive
                genius with a sense of dissatisfaction and impatience. We can imagine him
                examining the first page of an <em>Abecedarium</em>, on which would be engraved, in
                three lines, with a clear space between each character, the letters of the alphabet,
                and speculating, as Cicero had speculated centuries before,<span class="footnote" data-note="03"
                    id="note-03">Hic ego non mirer esse quemquam qui
                    sibi persuadeat
                    .&#160;.&#160;.&#160;. mundum effici .&#160;.&#160;.&#160;. ex concursione fortuitâ! Hoc qui existimet
                    fieri potuisse, non intelligo cur non idem putet si innumerabiles
                    unius et viginti formæ litterarum, vel aureæ, vel qualeslibet, aliquò
                    conjiciantur, posse ex his in terram excussis, annales Ennii, ut
                    deinceps legi possint, effici” (<em>De Nat. Deor.</em>, lib. ii). Cicero was
                    not the only ancient writer who entertained the idea of mobile letters.
                    Quintilian suggests the use of ivory letters for teaching children
                    to read while playing: “Eburneas litterarum formas in ludum offere”
                    (<em>Inst. Orat.</em>, i, cap. 1); and Jerome, writing to Læta, propounds the
                    same idea: “Fiant ei (Paulæ) litteræ vel buxeæ vel eburneæ, et suis
                    nominibus appellentur. Ludat in eis ut et lusus ipse eruditio fiat.”</span>
                on the possibilities presented by the combination in indefinite variety of those twenty-five symbols.
                Being a practical man as well as a theorist, we may suppose he would attempt
                to experiment on the little wood block in his hand, and by sawing off first
                the lines, and then some of the letters in the lines, attempt to arrange his little
                types into a few short words. A momentous experiment, and fraught with the
                greatest revolution the world has ever known!</p>
    
    
            <p>No question has aroused more interest, or excited keener discussion in the
                history of printing, than that of the use of movable wooden types as a first
                stage in the passage from Xylography to Typography. Those who write on the
                affirmative side of the question profess to see in the earlier typographical works,
                as well as in the historical statements handed down by the
                old authorities, the clearest evidence that wooden types were used, and that several of the most
                famous works of the first printers were executed by their means.</p>
    
            <p>As regards the latter source of their confidence, it is at least remarkable
                that no single writer of the fifteenth century makes the slightest allusion to the
                use of wooden types. Indeed, it was not till Bibliander, in 1548,<span class="footnote" data-note="04"
                    id="note-04"><em>In Commentatione de ratione
                        communi omnium linguarum et
                        literarum.</em> Tiguri, 1548, p. 80.</span>
                first mentioned
                and described them, that anything professing to be a record on the subject
                existed. “First they cut their letters,” he says, “on wood blocks the size of an
                entire page, but because the labour and cost of that way was so great, they devised
                movable wooden types, perforated and joined one to the other by a thread.”</p>
    
            <p>The legend, once started, found no lack of sponsors, and the typographical
                histories of the sixteenth century and onward abound with testimonies confirmatory
                more or less of Bibliander’s statement. Of these testimonies, those only
                are worthy of attention which profess to be based on actual inspection of the
                alleged perforated wooden types. Specklin<span class="footnote" data-note="05" id="note-05">In <em>Chronico
                        Argentoratensi</em>, <em>m.s.</em> ed. Jo. Schilterus,
                    p. 442. “Ich habe die erste press, auch die buchstaben gesehen, waren
                    von holtz geschnitten, auch gäntze wörter und syllaben, hatten löchle,
                    und fasst man an ein schnur nacheinander mit einer nadel, zoge sie
                    darnach den zeilen in die länge,” etc.</span>
                (who died in 1589) asserts that he
                saw some of these relics at Strasburg. Angelo Roccha,<span class="footnote" data-note="06"
                    id="note-06"><em>De
                        Bibliothecâ Vaticanâ.</em> Romæ, 1591, p. 412.
                    “Characteres enim a primis illis inventoribus non ita eleganter et
                    expedite, ut a nostris fieri solet, sed filo in litterarum foramen
                    immisso connectebantur, sicut Venetiis id genus typos me vidisse
                    memini.”</span>
                in 1591, vouches for the
                existence of similar letters (though he does not say whether wood or metal) at
                Venice. Paulus Pater,<span class="footnote" data-note="07" id="note-07"><em>De Germaniæ Miraculo</em>, etc.
                    Lipsiæ, 1710, p. 10.
                    “&#160;.&#160;.&#160;.&#160;. ligneos typos, ex buxi frutice, perforatos in medio, ut zonâ
                    colligari unâ jungique commode possint, ex Fausti officina reliquos,
                    Moguntiæ aliquando me conspexisse memini.”</span>
                in 1710, stated that he had once seen some belonging to
                Fust at Mentz; Bodman, as late as 1781, saw the same types in a worm-eaten
                condition at Mentz; while Fischer,<span class="footnote" data-note="08" id="note-08"><em>Essai sur les
                        Monumens
                        Typographiques de Jean Gutenburg.</em>
                    Mayence, an 10, 1802, p. 39.</span>
                in 1802, stated that these precious relics were
                used as a sort of token of honour to be bestowed on worthy apprentices on the
                occasion of their finishing their term.</p>
    
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